Friday, October 24, 2014

1. I sometimes post beer
recommendations here, but it is always only after rigorous testing and careful
study.

But, if by "rigorous study", you mean "more than one tasting", I will have made
an exception today by mentioning Black Albert, brewed by De Struise of
Belgium. Depending on whom you believe at Beer Advocate, this one
is either
"world class" or merely "outstanding". I lean towards the former description,
for this is a truly memorable beer.

Click to enlarge.

The label
notes (above) say it all.

2. At
$1799.00 it's ... out of my price range, but if I had money to burn, I couldn't
think of a better kitchen gadget than one
that would allow me to brew whatever I want in only four
hours. An excerpt from a USA Today review of the "PicoBrew"
reads in part:

Hit "brew" and walk away. The Internet-connected PicoBrew adds the
ingredients based on the chosen recipe...

And lest the folks at Unclutterercluck, this is
no mere "unitasker". Apparently, it is
"also great for Sous-Vide [sic] cooking".

3. He's making the country more like Soviet
Russia every day, so I can't think of a people better-suited to poke
fun at Barack Obama than the Russians.

4. I don't condone
vandalism, but the story
about how a raccoon became an aardvark nevertheless
makes interesting reading:

This kind of feedback loop--wherein an error that appears on
Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers
authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original
falsehood--is a documented phenomenon. There's even a Wikipedia article
describing it. Some of the most
well-known examples involve Wikipedia entries for famous people, such
as when users edited the article on the British actor Sacha Baron Cohen to say
he had worked at Goldman Sachs. When a Wikipedia editor tried to
remove the apocryphal detail, it took some convincing. Because it had since
appeared in several articles on Cohen in the British press, the burden was on
Wikipedians to disprove the myth. [link in original, minor format
edits]

Amusingly, the next paragraph of the article mentions that the Internet
encyclopedia had, for a long time, erroneously reported the birth date of its
own founder. I love Wikipedia, but I love being sure of the truth
more. For important matters, it is wise to seek multiple sources for factual
information.